Month: September 2009

A few days ago I gave my first impressions of the Greenlife Emerald Viewer, an alternate Second Life viewer; today I’m examining a few more of its features.

Bianca Kendall reported two particularly useful features of the viewer: radar and teleport history. In this article, we’ll explore these along with some useful build options.

The Radar button is located on the bottom menu bar, next to the Communicate button. It has an impressive range of features. It detects all avatars who are within your Graphics draw distance and reports their name, distance, age in days, and the viewer (client) they are running, although it didn’t recognize any other clients I tested (Meerkat, Snowglobe, or the standard Second Life viewer).

Radar shows you avatar profiles and allows you to offer them a TP, to teleport to them, to mute them, and either to "track" or "Mark" them. "Track" means that you you can see where they are located; "Mark" sets a flag next to their name in the Radar listing.

Another Radar feature is Moderation; this is useful for dealing with griefers on your land or estate. You can freeze them for 30 seconds, mute them, eject them, or file an Abuse Report on them.

Another feature in Greenlife Emerald that’s lacking in the standard browser is Teleport History, which you find in the Emerald drop down menu on the main menu bar. It shows your teleport history for your current login session, allows you to repeat the teleport, to show it on the map, and to copy the SLURL to the clipboard.

Another feature that some people will find extremely handy is the Command Line option, which you find in Edit/Preferences/Emerald/Page 1. It allows you to type certain commands into chat that do things like teleport you to ground level, or to a specified elevation, or to a region, or to home. One feature I’ll find extremely useful is the teleport to camera position command. If you’re like me and you roam with your camera, it can be very handy to be able to easily teleport to a place your camera is showing you. Another feature that could be useful is Calc. It allows you to do calculations. Do you quickly need to sum a few numbers? Just type "calc" in the chat window followed by the numbers you want to sum. It works for more complex mathmatical expressions also.

Finally, also on Edit/Preferences/Emerald/Page 1 you’ll find some Build options that can be very useful. You can change many default characteristics for prims that you create. Do you want your default prim to be 4mx6mx2m, Phantom, Glass, with a specified texture from your inventory with partial transparency and glow? It’s easy. Just set specify it here and then it will be the default for all prims you create.

If you’ve used the Greenlife Emerald viewer, I hope you’ll share your experiences in the Comments section.

You can download the Greenlife Emerald Viewer at modularsystems.sl. There’s a listing of available third party Second Life viewers at the Second Life Wiki, and you can read an earlier article in this series about  fifteen alternate Second Life viewers.

I’ve been using the Greenlife Emerald Viewer for Second Life recently and I like it, although I’ve only begun exploring its features.

The first thing you notice is the different login screen. The photos are different – and I think better – than with the standard Second Life viewer, and you’re given several additional choices and more information.

At the upper right, you see "Turn BG Images OFF" and "Turn BG /w People OFF". Clicking the first toggles the picture on and off. Clicking the second apparently toggles showing pictures with people in them, though when testing it for this report, toggling it on didn’t show pictures with people in them. I find that with my computer at least, the images sometimes are very slow to appear.

The upper left shows the grid status, the current Second Life time, total Second Life residents (it shows 16,767,189 as of this writing), and the number logged in during the last sixty days and currently logged in. At the lower left, there’s a log of the most recent half dozen grid problems and their resolution.

One new feature on the login screen that I particularly like is the ability to log in at the location shown in the picture displayed on the login screen..

I do a lot of photography in Second Life and one of my great frustrations with the standard viewer is the indirect access to the Advanced Sky Editor. The Greenlife Emerald Viewer solves this problem by putting the Advanced Sky Editor, the Advanced Water Editor, and the Day Cycle Editor on the Environment Settings dropdown menu. They are still available in their usual places under the Environment Editor, but you no longer have to go through the Environment Editor to get to them. This for me is a huge improvement.

The other major changes from the standard viewer are a wide array of additional choices in a new Emerald tab under Edit/Preferences, and a new Emerald drop down menu from the top menu bar. You’ll find pictures of them in the slide show below this article. I haven’t played with most of them yet, but one feature that stands out is the variety of choices of skins. Another is the additional build options it provides. I haven’t tried them yet, but they could be useful.

There was one thing that irritated me about Greenlife Emerald until I found how to disable it. By default, it displays "(Emerald)" in bright green next to your avatar name, but you don’t see it yourself. Only others see it. I didn’t learn about it until I logged on with three of my avatars and noticed that each of them saw it displayed on the other two. It’s easily disabled. Just go to Edit/Preferences/Emerald/Page 1 and uncheck the box next to Display Client Tags.

The only problem I’ve encountered so far with Greenlife Emerald is probably not specific to this viewer. I tried taking a snapshot while my avatar was hovering at about 150 meters with my Graphics set to all maximums – screen size, quality, draw distance, etc. Every time I snapped a picture, the viewer crashed; it didn’t happen when I shot while standing on the ground, only when I was flying. The same thing happened with the standard and the Meerkat viewers but interestingly, it did not happen with the Imprudence viewer. I haven’t had the opportunity to repeat the test, so I don’t know whether it was a problem in the viewers or an unrelated problem that cleared up before I logged on with Imprudence.

I’ll give a more complete report on Greenlife Emerald in a future article. If you’ve used it, I hope you’ll share your experience in the Comments section.

You can download the Greenlife Emerald Viewer at modularsystems.sl. There’s a listing of available third party Second Life viewers at the Second Life Wiki, and you can read an earlier article about alternate viewers.

In this picture, multiple avatars logged onto a single computer ponder the problem of using multiple avatars logged onto multiple computers. We discussed these options in Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of this series.. One thing we haven’t yet discussed is the most basic: why would anyone want to use several avatars simultaneously?

If you already know, you can stop reading here, but if you don’t, read on. This column is for you. The following are some situations in which this writer has found using multiple multiple avatars simultaneously to be essential:

Photography: Often when you do photography, you need subjects. If you need more than one avatar in your shot, you either need to round up other people’s avatars to be subjects, or log on simultaneously with different avatars. This is often easier than coordinating with several other people. It can also be a convenient way of getting pictures from different angles without continually changing your camera position.

Machinima: Just as with photography, when making a machinima, it can be easier to use one or more viewers for camera control, as well as for controlling multiple avatars.

Multiple events: Sometimes there are two events you need to be at simultaneously. By logging on simultaneously as two avatars, you can be at both events at the same time. This can be particularly useful when you want to record transcripts or take photographs at one event while being active at another event. It allows you, for example, to record and save to a file the transcript of one meeting while simultaneously taking active part in a different meeting somewhere else in Second Life.

Comparing viewers: If you want to compare features of various viewers, it’s easiest if you have them all open at the same time.

Building: It can be useful to have your Second Life camera trained on an object from several angles while building, and especially when aligning prims.

There are other uses as well; these are just the situations in which this writer has found multiple viewers to be extremely useful.

The other parts in this series are:
Part 1: Four ways of running multiple viewers and avatars simultaneously
Part 2: Videos and more details about running multiple viewers and avatars on a single computer
Part 3: Running multiple viewers and avatars on multiple computers with a KVM switch.

In Part 1, we discussed using multiple computers to use multiple Second Life avatars and viewers simultaneously. It has the advantage of having a much lower impact on computer performance than using a single computer, but also has two major disadvantages:

1. Expense: If you’re not using laptops, you could have the additional expenses of buying additional monitors and keyboards (and additional speakers if the audio will be different in each viewer).

2. Logistics: Even if you don’t have to buy additional monitors and keyboards, running Second Life on multiple computers is still a logistical nightmare. Most people don’t have room on their desks for three or four laptops or monitors and keyboards, and switching between them can be a hassle.

There’s a solution: a KVM switch. This device allows you to control several computers simultaneously with a single keyboard and monitor. Some KVM switches also allow you to use a single set of speakers. With the KVm switch, your hands never need leave your keyboard. With a few keystrokes, control switches to another computer. It can work really well.

This writer uses an IOGEAR Four Port USB KVM Switch (model GCS634U). There are other companies making similar products. I haven’t tested them, so I can’t recommend one over the other, but the IOGEAR has worked well for me. Be sure to read reviews carefully before deciding which one to buy.

If running multiple viewers simultaneously isn’t affecting the performance of your computer, then there’s no point in using a multiple computer setup. But if you’re running more than two viewers simultaneously or if you’re doing something that’s resource-intensive, such as making a machinima, then using multiple computers with a KVM switch may work better for you.

The other parts in this series are:
Part 1: Four ways of running multiple viewers and avatars simultaneously
Part 2: Videos and more details about running multiple viewers and avatars on a single computer
Part 4: Why on earth (ok, virtual Earth!) would someone want to run multiple viewers and avatars simultaneously?

You can get information about where to download alternate Second Life viewers at wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Alternate_viewers#Third-party_Viewers.